Fine line black script tattoo of a Latin quote running across the upper back.

Latin script quote across upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A single line of fine black script reads "non est ad astra mollis e terris via" across the upper back, just below the shoulder blade. The linework is thin and even, with the letters slightly slanted and spaced widely across the skin. The photograph is warmly lit on bare skin with a soft, shallow focus and a pale cloth in the background.

Fine line Lettering Back Text Quote Latin phrase Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last northbound at Leeds pulled out at twenty to one, and by then the concourse belonged to me, the cleaners and the pigeons that refused to leave the roof. Every Thursday a man called Ivo Sayers came to my window at half past eleven with a canvas case under his arm and asked for a single to Hebden Bridge, which he never took. He paid in coins he counted twice, then sat on the bench under the clock until the final train had gone, as though it had insulted him.

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One night he left a paperback on the counter. Inside the cover, in pencil, he had copied a line in a careful, slanting hand: non est ad astra mollis e terris via. I asked Maureen, who cleaned the platforms and had done two years of Latin at a convent school. She laughed and said it was Seneca, and that it meant there is no soft road from the earth to the stars. "Nobody tells you that," she said. "They just show you the picture."

Ivo came back the next Thursday with the case open. Inside, on green baize, lay a brass sextant with its mirror cracked clean across. He said it had happened on the Pennines in sleet, on the one night he had nearly seen the comet at the right angle. He wanted a ticket to the top of the moor, because the road up was never going to be easy, and he was tired of waiting for it to become one.

I printed him a single to Hebden Bridge, the only ticket I had that was valid for a walk. He thanked me and went out past the dead escalators into drizzle that made the streetlamps look like candles. The stub was still on my counter in the morning. Someone had written on the back in biro, very small: go on, then.